With the growing capabilities of communication systems and technologies, companies and organizations have increasingly gravitated toward providing customer service through telecommunications and calling centers. Many businesses and organizations implementing such systems, however, are inundated with calls on a regular basis from customers who need immediate attention or prefer communicating via telephone. For example, many on-line retailers provide a customer service hotline for order status inquiries or complaints. Depending on the popularity of the retailer, such a customer service hotline may receive hundred or thousands of calls a day. Consequently, those calling a customer service center may be required to wait in a queue for tens of minutes before a live agent is available to address their concerns.
However, callers are often in a situation where the assistance of the agent is essential to solve a pending problem or issue, such as a billing error or a product malfunction. Thus, the caller may feel that he has no choice but to wait on hold, in a caller queue. In addition, the caller generally must stay in close proximity to their telephones during these long hold times in order to know when an agent has picked up their call. A caller is thus limited in their activities until the call is fielded and their concerns are resolved. Even with the mobility of cellular telephones, a caller must still stay within a particular vicinity of the phone in order to detect that a live agent has come on the line. Additionally, long hold times for a mobile telephone may translate to significant costs as many cellular networks charge mobile phone usage by the minute.